The present invention relates in general to materials handling vehicles and, more particularly, to diagnosing and repairing such vehicles. While the present invention is generally applicable to materials handling vehicles, it will be described herein with reference to a rider reach fork lift truck for which it is particularly applicable and for which it is initially being utilized.
Materials handling vehicle repairs and service have conventionally been handled by trained personnel who are familiar with vehicles in need of diagnosis and repair. Control systems in these vehicles may generate an event code prior to being shut down to prevent possible damage to the vehicle due to a fault. Trained repair personnel were then faced with a dead vehicle with no information regarding the fault or, at best, were provided with an event code which identified the general area of the vehicle wherein a fault had occurred. Armed with this knowledge of the vehicle, and possibly the general direction provided by conventional event codes, the repair personnel would make reference to a detailed service manual to repair the faults.
While some repair personnel are very highly skilled and are able to quickly diagnose and repair faults in material handling vehicles under these circumstances, many other less skilled and less experienced repair persons are not. Repair persons of all skill levels can become extremely frustrated when faced with little, if any, clue as to a potential fault and a vast amount of general information about the vehicle which contains a solution to the fault but no way to effectively identify that solution. What has been experienced in the field in response to such frustration is resort to what may be referred to as "swaptronics", i.e., switching out components until a fault component, if any, is finally replaced to return the vehicle to service.
When swaptronics is employed, particularly in modern materials handling vehicles which include one or more computers or "black boxes", all too commonly a computer, probably one of the more expensive system components, is first replaced to be sure that it is not the cause of the fault since historically it was the most difficult to diagnose. If not the problem, additional components also end up being replaced resulting in large quantities of fault free components being replaced, possibly under warranty, with resultant costs and lost time both for the service person and the down time of the vehicle. In addition to the high relative cost of computer components, replacement of a computer is often a more difficult task than replacement of components driven by the computer which components have proven much more likely to be the cause of a fault than the computer.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved arrangement for diagnosing and repairing faults which occur in materials handling vehicles. Such an improved diagnostic arrangement should make diagnosis and repair less dependent on the experience and skill level of a repair person by leading the repair person step-by-step through a diagnostics procedure to accurately identify the cause of a fault and enable the repair person to make a repair without replacement of properly functioning components. Preferably, such an improved diagnostic arrangement would follow a set procedure regardless of the location of faults which need to be corrected with the procedure not only leading the repair person to faulty components but clearly indicating the identity and location of those components on the vehicle through directions, maps and component identification labeling. In addition, the directions, maps and component identification labels should be provided to the service person as needed in the diagnostic process, i.e., information is provided to the service person on-time, rather than being presented as a mass of information which can overwhelm, frustrate and delay diagnosis and repair.